I mean have they seen how good Ice Cubes and Mlem look? How can they choose the default Twitter and Reddit apps over those masterpieces.
I have a feeling that spez was an ordinary man when he started reddit. Then he became an asshat, of course.
I can’t even blame spez for becoming that asshat. Trying to ride herd on something as large, diverse, and popular as reddit has become, requires someone who is willing to be an asshat.
If you ever find yourself in charge a group of diverse people remember that you will never satisfy everyone. And a lot of the time the best you can hope for is to piss off everyone equally.
If all the average users were here, it would be just as awful as Reddit became when it hit mainstream acceptance level.
Remember that subreddits there were quality when small but sort of became too large to have character after a certain threshold, I seem to recall 300k subscribers and up being about where that delineation was.
Lemmy could stand to be more popular, but not too popular or it would attract the bottom feeders that make stupid one liner comments and upvote wrong answers.
Enjoy the smaller lemmy while it lasts
Edited for clarity, gotta drop the reddit shorthand
Shut up and take my upvote.
r/angryupvote
/s of course.
“The problem isn’t corporate, the problem is audience size.”
Shut the fuck up about this.
Lemmy isn’t anything right now. No impact or relevance, no practical effect in terms of community and influence. It’s just small conversations and mild entertainment.
If you enjoy that, go ahead. But don’t campaign to hold the whole fediverse project back.
Just get together in a niche instance with your small town types and defederate if the project successfully becomes a full fledged alternative. The Internet needs a successful full scale alternative to corporate social media to have a chance at recovery from enshittification.
Both of you can be correct. Some communities (e.g. technical subjects like photography, self hosting, etc.) can work well at lower numbers. Some others might be more social were numbers might allow more organic interactions.
Here like Reddit, the best experience is achieved by trying to find the ones you are interested in and following them. It is more apparent here I think since there is not as much content.
It’s not a campaign, its an observation based on whats come before. It’ll come for lemmy the same as it did for reddit.
I’ll adapt as it grows like before, but the fact remains that online communities are at their best when it isnt 3 million subscribers shouting over each other. On the flip side, 3 million users would likely spawn enough interest for super niche communities to self sustain themselves. The broad interest communities though, those will become just like reddit is now.
No it’s not a campaign but it’s a sizable unorganized proportion of Lemmy who wants to argue for soft isolationism and little to to outreach, recruiting and general onboarding/accessibility reworks that would make Lemmy too easy to understand and join.
I seem to recall 300k subscribers and up being about where that delineation was.
Interesting number, but why not have it based on active users rather than subs?
Because that’s just an easy metric you can eyeball to gauge a subreddit community
I remember it being roughly true but I have no data other than anecdotal to back that up
No worries, thanks!
I think “subs” in this instance refers to subcommunities or subreddit, not subscribers.NM. Missed the word subscribers in the original comment.
My bad. Yes I meant sub as in subreddit, I need to drop the reddit shorthand lingo since I don’t use the site anymore and it’s confusing on lemmy
That coke-rush is just temporary and afterwards, leaves you feeling like this:
Obligatory reference to SNL’s parody take, though more for Oscar the Grouch: https://youtu.be/kqpak5lFxvs.
You’re talking about people that are content with “the internet” being google, facebook, instagram, snap, tiktok, youtube and twitter, nothing more.
What’s snap?
It’s a software package system for Linux.
Snapchat
Oh. Snap.
Ahhh, thank you. I forget about that one sometimes
Honestly, if I weren’t politically as far left as I am, lemmy would have scared me off a long time ago.
And you need to be a particular kind of weird person to sift all the random posts. The average user actually wants an algorithm.
It’s strange experience being so used to algorithm fed social media and coming back here.
Definitely takes some getting used to. It’s like cutting out sugar from your coffee.
We like configuring config files btw.:-D
I wish that lemmy had the population to sustain more niche communities.
Feel free to come help us promote it on https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/
I mean have they seen how good Ice Cubes and Mlem look? How can they choose the default Twitter and Reddit apps over those masterpieces.
No, they haven’t. 99% of people have never heard of the fediverse or any app within it.
People here are so out of touch here; it’s super interesting
In a way, it’s a good sign. The threadiverse is tight-knit and comprehensive enough to become people’s primary social site. I’ve never seen any other reddit alternative get to this point.
It became my primary. Had never heard/understood federated-internet anything before lemmy. And it’s been a really good time here
Reddit is now just a Quora for me, when I’m using a search engine. I don’t scroll Instagram, but just look at what (3) people send me. Facebook is for rare use-cases, so I haven’t deleted my account. YouTube I watch, rarely scroll, and don’t interact. And I think that’s about it currently
Lemmy has it’s own issues/flavor for sure… but I dig it. I learned my first forum basics from Something Awful, and there’s a certain vibe here that reminds me of that. The fediverse (threadiverse? I haven’t heard that term) feels like an internet community center or something
threadiverse is for threaded apps like lemmy and kbin, as in practice they’re mainly a seperate network from things like mastodon.
Discuit still has less than 200 weekly commenters: https://discuit.net/DiscuitMeta/post/HCHvcmBc
Lemmy has 42000 monthly active users
What is the standard for counting the active user? As a lurker, I don’t think I would be counted.
Voting, commenting or posting. With this comment, you’re active.
That explains why I recognize people all the time. We’re basically a small city
Dang, those numbers are moving though. Not bad.
I don’t think so, just activists who like to complain about not enough people being aware of the alternative.
Im not complaining personally. I think its all interesting. We have the technically and non technically inclined in different media spheres with different exposure. Sometimes its funny or entertaining but its always interesting no matter what seeing how there are effectively two different worlds and many are really mostly only aware of one or the other it seems.
I told everyone in my family, and it was one ear and out the other.
My sister told me the other day, “I didn’t know I could add reddit it to my Google search and get better results.” All I could think is, “you figured that out right when everything went to shit, damn.”
Lmao thanks for sharing this.
Even if Reddit is way worse now, it is still very useful for specific topics. For example how to make soap, reddit is very useful in that regard. Though it is still funny when a clearly fake story gets alot of attraction https://www.reddit.com/r/AITAH/comments/1hz1y5y.
My wife still uses reddit. She’s well aware of the controversy, and why I left, and just doesn’t care.
I guess most people don’t want to wade through dozens of “eat the rich” posts every time thay open their favorite social media platform.
Nah, people get overwhelmed by choosing a server instance.
Both true.
Or any political content at all. Most people just want to look at funny cats or memes.
Other people want absurd humor without the racist degeneracy of other outlets.
I quit FB and reddit because they became mostly “kill all who don’t work minimum wage at mcdonalds”, “all minorities r bad” and “ukranians are nazis but check out this 3d model which is the next russian wundewaffe that will kill your countries civillians”
Weird. That’s like my main kink.
Same, but not everybody shares that.
In other words: Advertising works.
As a non tech expert, in my view, the biggest concern for the fediverse to grow, presently, is how difficult it can be to sign up.
Go to a instance listing, try and choose one, signup… all of this should be acessible but mostly invisible for the average user. The user should only be questioned what sort of content they mostly intend to browse, have a NSFW explicit option, perhaps a server location preference, and that should be it.
Beneath the hood, this process should trigger a call to the network requesting a user slot for any server that could cater to that generic profile the prospect user filled. Even bans should be handled differently, in my opinion.
Imagine to go over all that… To end up on .ml
You’re 100% on point. From first attempt to getting my final account it took me a few weeks. Had an instance close down days after joining, another blocking communities I was interested, sign up denied…
In fucking reddit you don’t even need a real email
I only used my email for safety purpose; I tend to forget passwords.
Again, as someone with very low technical skills, I think things could be tweaked to increase traction. Even funding.
I’m not even adverse to see advertisement on the Fediverse, as long as those trying to advertise here keep in mind they want to reach the user base here, not the other way around. To this, it would imply low impact, discreet and highly curated advertisement.
Instances closing down don’t shock me. People have other things to do: real life should take precedence over social media. I like to be here but when my smartphone broke and I was back on a Nokia brick, I didn’t missed it.
An instance shutting down should automatically request to the network transfer of its subscribed users. Again, something the users should be aware of but completely invisible to them.
And even bans should work like that. A user may become persona non grata but they still should be capable of accessing the rest of the network or, at least, request transfer. Hard bans, in my view, only create malice and the creation of other accounts, that will just eat the capability of the instance to receive new users.
What do you think about this?
"Lemmy has 42k monthly active users
- https://discuss.online/ if you’re American
- https://sopuli.xyz/ if you’re European
- https://vger.app/ if you want an app"
Hey, I’m on sopuli!
So am I on my alt. Great instance.
https://sopuli.xyz/ if you’re European
Out of curiosity, how come you don’t recommend your own instance, feddit.org?
I think the main concern new users have are “Can I see everything across Lemmy, or will I be getting a fragmented experience?”. This was my initial concern and I’ve seen Redditors also voice this concern. People don’t know if being on an instance means you can only be isolated to that instance, which would mean missing out on wider content, or whether you see everything (at which point you might ask what is the point of the instances then?).
By presenting people with “here’s an instance if you’re American, here’s another if you’re European” might support the idea that people will get differenct experiences based on their location. They might ask: “Do Americans see different content to Europeans? What’s the difference? Maybe the American instance will have more users so I’ll pick that instead.”
In reality it doesn’t matter, you can sign up to an instance and subscribe to 0 communities on your own instance, but people don’t know this if they don’t know anything about it. I do wonder whether instances should be scored by a few factors and recommended that way?
- How many instances they’ve defederated from - the bigger the number the more it negatively affects the score
- How many admins it has - instances with 1 admin should not be recommended at all
- Availability - probably don’t want to recommend instances with poor uptime
- Theme - more general purpose instances would score higher, while instances with a specific focus would score lower
It would be good if the join-lemmy site could randomly create you an account on one of the instances that qualify. Take that cognitive load away from the user and make that choice for them - and make it clear that they’re free to sign up to any instance they want.
Out of curiosity, how come you don’t recommend your own instance, feddit.org?
Even if feddit.org is bilingual, the main language is still German. The sidebar text is in German first, !main@feddit.org is name “Haupteingang” and is mostly in German, the Matrix chat is in German, etc. It makes sense, it’s the successor of feddit.de, but probably not ideal for a non-German speaker. My main account is on sopuli.
By presenting people with “here’s an instance if you’re American, here’s another if you’re European” might support the idea that people will get differenct experiences based on their location.
Indeed, I guess I’ll add a short “using a server on your continent is better for latency, content is the same”
I do wonder whether instances should be scored by a few factors and recommended that way?
I kind of did a similar assesssment a while ago (https://feddit.org/post/5215276/3396746)
Long story short, there is no ideal generalist instance. If you open the top 20 instances (https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/)
- Lemmy.world is too big
- Lemm.ee is federated with hexbear and lemmygrad, something that is not very welcoming to new users (see this thread: https://sh.itjust.works/post/28798607/15305964 )
- sh.itjust.works names contains “shit”, which can deter users
- lemmy.ca is Canadian-centric
- feddit.org, as you mentioned, is German-centric, but technically English speaking too
- dbzer0 federates hexbear
- programming.dev is topic-centric
- blahaj is queer-focused
- discuss.tchncs.de has a difficult name
- lemmy.sdf.org does not defederate anyone
- lemmy.zip is federated with hexbear and lemmygrad
- beehaw is way outdated
- infosec.pub is topic-centric
- aussie.zone is country-centric
- midwest.social is region-centric
That’s how I came up with sopuli.xyz (neutral name, stable, defederated grad and hexbear) and discuss.online (same)
it’s the successor of feddit.de
Oh dang. What happened to de?
Admins went missing, database got blorked. It was a mess for a while
“Can I see everything across Lemmy, or will I be getting a fragmented experience?”.
This is 100% a huge concern for Mastodon. But for Lemmy isn’t that figure closer to like 1%?
People who don’t even know what things like “Beehaw” or “Hexbear” or “Lemmygrad” are, aren’t going to be put out so much that access to them is barred.
Lemmy.World has ~80% of all Lemmy users last I checked though I expect that will radically shift in the next couple of months (due to their policy change announcement yesterday). Like it or not, Lemmy is far more centralized than other Fediverse offerings like Mastodon, PeerTube, and I would presume Friendica.
Also, doesn’t Mastodon still lack an All feed? In contrast, the default sort option of https://discuss.online/ is to show All, so how is this really all that fragmented? The default sort option for lemmy.ml is Local, so without pressing any buttons the fragmentation effect is far greater there - they will see no posts to communities like !tenforward@lemmy.world or !AskUSA@discuss.online or anywhere else until they start poking around to see how the software works. But even there, unlike Mastodon (at least historically), pressing one button will instantly show the majority of the Fediverse content (well… minus everyone who got banned from that instance, which actually… is quite a lot).
Am I missing something though: what are users worried about in terms of fragmentation that applies to Lemmy? (That is actually true I mean, bc from what I can see, while it’s true for other Fediverse offerings, it’s not for Lemmy?)
Lemmy.World has ~80% of all Lemmy users last I checked though I expect that will radically shift in the next couple of months (due to their policy change announcement yesterday). Like it or not, Lemmy is far more centralized than other Fediverse offerings like Mastodon, PeerTube, and I would presume Friendica.
15667/41874 = 37% of Lemmy monthly active users on LW: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/
256908/777047 = 33% of Mastodon monthly active users on Mastodon.social: https://fedidb.org/software/mastodon/
Am I missing something though: what are users worried about in terms of fragmentation that applies to Lemmy?
I think it’s that they don’t know ANYTHING about it, other than it’s a bunch of different servers that seem to operate independently. So they have no idea how the whole thing operates. I’ve been on Lemmy for about 18 months and I don’t know how the federation works for Mastodon or Friendica - I actually looked up Friendica the other day but just gave up after looking at the list of instances. I don’t know what it means to use a specific instance for Friendica, even though I know what it means for Lemmy. These people won’t know what it means at all.
Oh okay. Though you said “I do wonder whether instances should be scored by a few factors and recommended that way?”, and wanted to point out that Blaze has already done that work, which culminated in the list of those instances (discuss.online and sopuli.xyz). It’s just that there are only a few instances (~20) that are most highly worth mentioning to someone who refuses to engage in such technical details, and beyond Lemmy.World that compromises ~80% of all users on Lemmy, everything else combined is part of that remaining 20% anyway.
So this list of two instances to check out is a highly optimized, extremely streamlined statement crafted to help people avoid exactly what you are referring to in analysis paralysis. Though perhaps a statement could be added that Lemmy specifically, unlike other Fediverse offerings, does not need to worry as much about the fragmentation effect?
The really cool thing about that list is that you can simply click and immediately get to browsing the entire Threadiverse (minus Threads:-P). You don’t even need an account, and so to lurk this is all you need to know to get started. After that, if someone wanted to join an instance other than these, then yeah your list recommendation would help, but also keep in mind that it would need to be maintained as well as made in the first place, and then people made aware of where to go to view it, the latter of which imho is the chief problem since admins mostly refuse to update the sidebar text even to point to entire communities dedicated to discussing such matters, like e.g. !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca. But if you are interested in making such a list btw, I’m saying just in case, that is a great community to post it to for a start.
Edit: I’ve often thought about making such a post with such a list, but (a) Blaze has already done it in the past, (b) it would keep changing e.g. Lemmy.World’s huge announcement yesterday, and © I’m legit not certain what the point is really, bc most people (except those of us who discuss such matters inside of the Fediverse:-) don’t seem to care so much about such details. The chief barriers to people joining seem to be: (a) where content at (we simply don’t have the sheer amounts that especially Reddit does); and factors like “there be tankies there” or “I needz my free speech” (aka I’m a MAGAT and I would prefer Truth Social). In that regard, Lemmy.World’s announcement might actually help bring more centrists here, rather than them being turned away by interaction with a power mod, though I leave it to others to judge if that will be a good thing or not.
Oh okay. Though you said “I do wonder whether instances should be scored by a few factors and recommended that way?”, and wanted to point out that Blaze has already done that work, which culminated in the list of those instances (discuss.online and sopuli.xyz)
Yeah fair enough, I didn’t know !Blaze@feddit.org had done that before I commented. My only feedback is that I don’t think they need to be categorised as “for Americans” and “for Europeans” - more like “here’s a couple of great, healthy general purpose instances to get your feet wet in Lemmy - don’t worry, you’re not restricted to just those servers, you can vote, comment and subscribe to communities across Lemmy!”
Whilst we’re on this topic of “sign-up friction” - here’s a good example of some struggles that “regular” people face - it’s about Pixelfed but I think the same logic applies:
Just installed it, clicked “Login” and I have to pick a server? Why do these new apps trying to replace Insta/Twitter/etc all have this without an explanation for people who don’t know what they’re selecting?
Does it matter what you pick? Are you “locked in” to a server? Do you only see the posts of people within the same server? Does everyone else see what server I choose? Can the servers shut down, leaving users stranded?
There needs to be a better intro for these decentralized services if they want more people to adopt. 99% of us want to click Sign Up, make a username/password and be in. Adding extra steps creates frustration which leads to just not finishing signup and loading up Instagram instead.
Lemmy.World that compromises ~80% of all users on Lemmy, everything else combined is part of that remaining 20% anyway.
15667/41874 = 37% of Lemmy monthly active users on LW: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/
Wow, that dropped FAST! I expected it to fall, but not by that much, and definitely not that quickly. Total MAUs also down from 43 to 41.9k. Hopefully someone has time to offer a post showing how the trends have changed recently.
In particular I started to notice it drop perhaps a month ago but wondered how “real” the effect was, vs. some kind of measuring glitch. Although the sidebar and other monitoring tools (the Datadog link in it) seems to support all of it.
At a guess, it could be a combination of many factors from the super old software that continues to fall further behind (0.19.13 vs. 0.19.18 already) to all the drama that continually spills forth from there. People, particularly non-technical ones, have a resistance to moving, but once that resistance is overcome…
I guess congratulations, you almost single-handedly helped make the Threadiverse (or whatever we are calling ourselves) more decentralized! 🎉🥳👏
Yeah, a lot of people have quit Twitter over Musk being a huge douche and migrated to… Blusky. And they think they’ve done something really great. It’s sad.
To be fair, Twitter is so bad now that Bsky is an improvement.
And Bsky has to appear trustful as they need to attract users.
That’s how they all begin.
Of course, but if the most urgent priority is to get people off Twitter, then Bsky is a better alternative at the moment.
Hopefully at some point Mastodon and Keyforks will catch up on discoverability
It blows my mind that all these services announcing their leaving of X haven’t spun up their own Mastodon instance.
social.transitchicago.com sounds just fine to me.
If you’re a company and you’re oblivious to ethical problems related to social media.
A platform with 20x the active userbase as the alternative is the obvious choice.
It’s transit. Your users will go where you tell them to go.
Even better, the open APIs will allow them to build whichever portions they want into their own apps. Or they could adapt an existing, open license third party app into their own platform using 90% existing code.
It’s easier for them to join a centralized platform like Bluesky, be it for the users count alone
Mastodon is not a twitter clone.
Bluesky is a twitter clone, without musk. That’s all these people want. They’ve never heard about the fediverse. They’re not protesting corporate centralism.
They just don’t like twitter being a right wing agenda. They want a twitter experience circa before musk bought it, simply because it was left wing before.
That’s bluesky. That’s not mastodon.
Bluesky is…fine. Currently, it operates the way that I wish Twitter did. It lets you curate your feed, it shows the feed in chronological order, and finally and most importantly it has a critical mass of users so there is actual content there, rather than every 5th post complaining about how everyone is on another platform or not using Linux.
Really, the only issue I have with it is that it is owned by a corporation. But like Twitter and Reddit, I am willing to abandon it for something else when it gets shittier.
What are your complaints (iiuc) for Bluesky?
Not OP, but the leadership has just shown themselves to be unable to run the platform how users want. They’re refusing to ban serial harasser Jesse Singal. Its head of trust and safety banned a bot and its creator because the bot pointed out that they liked a porn post on their work account for ‘harassment’. Bear in mind the entire point of Bluesky is for all this info to be public and easily accessible.
I mean just because the info is there doesn’t mean you should run with it. It’s just rude
my personal dislike for it is that the claims of decentralization are countered by how expensive it is to operate in a truly decentralized manner.
To be truly decentralized you would need to run a relay server, not just a PDS which many people already do and simply holds your data. Unfortunately, the cost to run a relay server today is already about $500+ a month [1] and will only be getting more expensive.
Lastly, while the fediverse has figured out decentralized DM’s, Bluesky DM’s are completely centralized [1] and only work thanks to being funneled through their servers. I wouldn’t call what they have private considering they can read what everyone on Bluesky is saying privately. Granted, fediverse DM’s are not encrypted either, but at least they’re decentralized and don’t allow a single provider access to everyone’s private messages.
[1] https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
Just that there’s nothing keeping Bluesky from enshittifying the same way Twitter (and all the other centrally-corporate-owned social media platforms) have. By migrating, the former Twitter users are just delaying the inevitable.
See the context and discussion on previous posts here:
Lemmy doesn’t have much to offer compared to the “billionaire run” social media.
This is not entirely true, at least as phrased here.
- Our quality of discussions is way higher, in our opinions, even though yes their topic range is so much more narrow (Star Trek, Linux, various Fediverse aspects, etc.).
- There are no ads, for some that is VERY noteworthy, especially those less technically inclined.
- As others mentioned the apps here blow the official Reddit one out of the water.
- (Edit: there is much more, I did not intend this listing to necessarily be comprehensive, e.g. one that I see people mentioning is a focus on user privacy.)
So all of this is not “nothing”, even though yes it is also not “everything” either.
Yea but can lmy run on Lynx browser?
…seriously asking cause I want to start using the Lynx browser for more.
Uh… try it and let us know?:-P
I wrote that on my phone. I’ll try when I get home from work today
The quality of discussion is the exact same. Lemmy isn’t more elite, hell I’d say an average user is more angry in general than on reddit. As for the rest - a regular (non-power) user doesn’t care. The privacy angle is bogus - you can get everything you want by hosting your own instance. Even more so - things that should be private, aren’t (reports, upvotes). The only “good” thing is the modlog, but that is also debatable.
This is the real answer. I forget the exact numbers, but the vast majority of people on reddit are just lurkers. When you have an enormous user base, that still translates to lots of content to consume. Lemmy has way less content and very small communities (if any) for most niches.
Of course you can point to bots on reddit inflating those numbers and that Lemmy has more meaningful interaction, but that’s not what most are looking for that are on reddit.
Also, as others mentioned, there’s no negative engagement algorithm drivers on mastodon like there is on Twitter. Fact is, a lot of people just like to be angry and combative.
Good point, if I just wanted to lurk reddit would be fine for that purpose. But the users are so wretchedly toxic that commenting is a no-go.
Voyager, Thunder and Arctic blow the Reddit app out of the water
The problem is that the app doesn’t mean much to people if it’s not serving up the content they want.
As you said elsewhere, chicken and egg problem
I wish most people were more interested in learning. But ive settled for people being entertaining at best due to that disinterest.
It’s unfortunate, but there’s a real chicken-and-egg problem here. Those of us who are on here are here because of how strongly we believe in the ideal of it, but for the average person who just cares about talking about their favourite interests, there’s a serious lack.
I’ll use two examples, one that you clearly care about, and one that I do. /r/stopkillinggames is hardly super active, but in the last 3 weeks it’s had 11 posts with a cumulative 68 comments. !stopkillinggames@lemm.ee, by contrast, has had just 8 posts, all by a mod, with just 6 total comments. /r/AgeofMythology is very active with artistic appreciation posts, balance discussion, and advice just within the last 24 hours. !aom@lemm.ee has failed to attract a single post from anyone other than myself, and it’s been over 3 months since anyone other than myself has left a comment. It’s disheartening, not being able to have conversations about the stuff you love, when you know that just over there it would be so easy.
Lemmy’s excellent if you want to talk about politics, or open source, but there’s not a huge amount outside of that. The Star Trek communities are pretty good, but they pale in comparison to a great sub like /r/daystrominstitute, and the amount and depth of discussion on ttrpg.network is slim compared to /r/pathfinder2e, /r/dndgreentext, /r/dndnext, etc. And these are some of the best-supported hobbies on Lemmy.
So as much as I’m staying here and trying to do my part to make it better, and frequently encourage others to join…I also can’t really blame people who don’t.
(I feel less charitably towards people on Twitter. Because that place is a total shithole, and Mastodon is surprisingly good, if you like microblogging platforms. Plus even Bluesky is better than staying on Twitter, and it has most of the celebrities and micro-celebrities some people might want to follow.)
To add to Blaze’s point: as lemmy’s still small, there’s not much point to super specialized communities when the more general ones are “slow” enough that pretty much any post you make can remain “newest” for 2 days straight.
I understand this perspective, and I occasionally flirt with it myself, but mostly I disagree.
My main view is that content should go in a community that will be interested in it. There’s a balance to be struck here to avoid getting hyper specific (for example, I’ve stopped using !brisbanetrains@aussie.zone in favour of just putting train stuff in !brisbane@aussie.zone), but I also think content that is fundamentally not about the topic of one community shouldn’t go in that community. I wouldn’t post Brisbane-specific local council politics in !australia@aussie.zone, for example.
My view is that subscribing to a community costs nothing. Creating a community costs nothing. Even moderating a community doesn’t have any very much cost for the moderator on a per-community (as opposed to per-post or per-comment) basis. There’s no actual harm caused by having 10 communities with 1 post per day, compared to one community with 10 posts per day. Instead, doing the former simply allows people to more easily filter for the content that they are interested in and avoid that which they are not.
I’ve given a more detailed reply to Blaze about the specific discussion at hand here, but since you brought up the general principle, I thought I’d reply to you with my general principle.
My view is that subscribing to a community costs nothing.
It does, to an extend. People don’t want to subscribe to dozens of different communities to get their content. As I said in the other comment, there’s a balance to be found, and usually more generic communities benefit from not having to be promoted in a lot of places to get known, people just see them from All or a post in !newcommunities@lemmy.world and subscribe because they see it as active and generic enough.
Except then the issue of community discovery gets more difficult.
Yeah that’s true, good point. I think the best option might be more dedicated communities but with strategic use of cross-posting/cross-promoting on occasion, with posts that do fit better in the general community. For example, I intend to post about major new releases of aom to broader game communities, and I will continue to mention that I’ve been playing it in threads like “what have you been playing” or other open question gaming-related threads, and put a promo for the community in those comments. But stuff that is too specific to the game, like balance patches and civ tier lists, would stay only in the specific community.
It is good to have options:-).
It’s disheartening, not being able to have conversations about the stuff you love, when you know that just over there it would be so easy.
Have you tried more generic gaming communities? !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works is quite active, I’m sure a regular thread about AoM there would definitely get some traction (or even just a one-time promotion thread)
The problem with more generic communities is that you might be sharing it with more people, but they’re not people who are engaged with the topic. And that’s what I really miss. The deep conversations on theorising, community drama, etc. that can only come from a large number of people who are really interested in the subject. Posting to a generic community limits the type of discussions you can have to those that are more accessible to a generic audience.
As another example, just now I’ve been playing Kerbal Space Program for the first real time (I toyed around with it briefly many years ago, but didn’t try career mode and completing contracts). Right now, I’m struggling to understand why something I’m doing isn’t working. I would love to be able to go to !kerbalspaceprogram and ask an audience of people who know what they’re talking about. Sure, I could try my luck in !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works or something even more generic like !games@lemmy.world. But neither of those are really the appropriate venue for something that’s so specifically only of interest to people who know about KSP. Posting “I’ve been playing KSP lately and really enjoying it” makes sense on patientgamers. Posting a detailed scenario of what I’ve been doing and what I’ve done in the past, and asking why it doesn’t work for me right now even though it seemed to work before…probably doesn’t.
Another example: I’ve been posting every useful or interesting guide or analysis of Age of Mythology I’ve come across to !aom. It wouldn’t really feel right to post that kind of thing to patientgamers. But I probably will post when the upcoming expansion comes out to more generic communities
Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe posting niche game-specific content to generic communities is a good way to bring attention to them for more people who would be interested in it, while also bringing attention to an audience that didn’t know they might be interested in it. I’d love to hear others’ thoughts on this. Maybe I should put a post in !fedigrow@lemm.ee for this discussion?
It’s always a question of balance. How many people will see your niche community? How actively do you promote it? Is the userbase even large enough to have enough people interested in your community?
You mentioned Age of Mythology, I actually posted a while ago about it on !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works : https://sopuli.xyz/post/14540736. I got a few comments there, so probably people you can try reaching out or pinging in your community.
I just had a look, you have 74 subscribers on !aom@lemm.ee. The userbase might be there, but if they are, they don’t know about it. You can try promoting it on
- !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works
- !games@sh.itjust.works
- !gaming@lemmy.world
- !rts@reddthat.com
- !strategy@lemmy.world
- !strategygames@sopuli.xyz
The last three communities aren’t that active, but they have between 200 and 300 subscribers, so that could help building your userbase.
As a side note, I don’t know how popular AoM is. Games like !stardewvalley@lemm.ee and !factorio@lemmy.world are doing fine, but they are quite popular and active.
For Kerbal, have you tried !ksp@lemmy.world? There is also
Might be worth it to choose one of them as “the one”, and promote it to the other one, as well as the gaming communities above.
As you can see, it takes quite some work to get a niche community going, and that’s why personally nowadays I stick to very generic communities: shows, pokemon, leagueoflegends (niche if you want, but still one of the most popular games worldwide), patientgamers.
For Kerbal, have you tried !ksp@lemmy.world?
Ah, no, I have not! I did try searching “kerbal space program” in the Communities search, but it only came back with a result from a dead instance. Looks like that instance completely lacks any reference to the full name of the game, which is why it didn’t show up. Rather incidentally, that’s why I made a deliberate choice to have the AoM community be !aom but have its display name be “Age of Mythology”. I knew people might search for either and wanted both to work.
Looks like the KSP mod is absent, or I’d suggest they do the same.
Thanks for those other community suggestions. I might take the opportunity of the upcoming expansion (I’m expecting a lunar new year release date, given it’s a Chinese civ) to share in those communities. I’m just very wary of being seen as overly spammy. Most of my promotion thus far has been looking for threads where I can respond by talking about Age of Mythology in the comments and linking it from there.
I don’t know how popular AoM is
Definitely not as popular as those others. That goes back to my original point. There’s a significant network effect in a site as big as Reddit, and it’s hard to blame individuals for not leaving if their smaller, more niche interests are not catered for on the new site yet. Even though, chicken-and-egg style, if they did all move at once to Lemmy, there would instantly be all the space for all the same communities to thrive.
At least we have tankies, so there’s that.
I jest, yet that’s a real worry that a large number of people have, like on Reddit when people (Blaze) promotes Lemmy that is quite often their first response (“hey, isn’t that the one where tankies who got booted off of Reddit went and made their own Reddit software?”).
That, and the fact that we are first and foremost, primarily a “Linux forum”. We do have general communities like AskLemmy and I even helped start an AskUSA so I’m not saying that there’s nothing else there, but we definitely lack the breadth and depth present on Reddit.
Maybe we can find better talking points, like “we have less content but our discussions are more worthwhile, where people tend to be kinder and also real rather than bots btw”.
Although Lemmy.World’s massive policy change announcement is definitely going to absorb all of our attention for the foreseeable future.
Another contributing factor is that Lemmy & Mastodon “care about privacy”. Odd, in my opinion, for a public social network.
Their interpretation of that is that they don’t send referer headers. So to any site receiving Lemmy traffic, we’re invisible.
Pretty sure that it’s the browser which is sending referrer headers, not the individual sites. That being said, even if a provider were looking at the refer headers in their analytics to determine where people were coming from, it would not show one url, but hundreds for all the different instances there are. This would cause Lemmy to be under represented in analytics, even if in aggregate it’s the largest source of traffic.
